The stakes for Obama couldn’t be higher. Everything’s at risk in the success or failure of the Affordable Care Act.

The year ahead promises tough gut-check tests for the nation, including domestic and foreign policy challenges likely to determine the fate of the Obama presidency.
No domestic issue will have a greater impact on the president — and on the electoral fortunes of both parties — than the success or failure of the Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare.

Republicans are counting on it to flop spectacularly. It’s their big election bet. The health insurance plan, they believe, will prove a mortal mistake, undermining the Obama presidency and handing the GOP complete congressional power in this fall’s midterm elections.

But it’s a gamble. If by November the president’s plan, his signature domestic initiative, hasn’t recovered from its stumbling start, odds favor Republicans to score well in the elections, holding on to their House majority and gaining at least the six seats necessary for control of the Senate, now in Democratic hands.

If on the other hand, the ACA lives up to Obama’s sales pitch — with enrollees in vast numbers entering the system with relative ease and moderate premium costs — Republicans will be hard-pressed to explain their unrelenting assault on the program as Armageddon itself and their obstructionist tactics in Congress and in Republican-run states.

The stakes for Obama couldn’t be higher. Even his credibility and the value of his promises and other commitments are at risk in the success or failure of the ACA.

On the foreign policy front, the central issue is Iran and Obama’s hope of winning Tehran’s agreement to curtail its nuclear program in return for a minimal relaxation of the sanctions crippling that country’s economy.

Under terms of the tentative bargain reached late last year, Iran must agree to the West’s terms within six months or the current sanctions regimen remains in place, or is even toughened.

Iran is widely distrusted in the West, with reason; its rulers have regularly lied about their nuclear buildup, especially the number of their centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Republicans and some Democrats have criticized Obama’s bid for fresh start with Iran, partly from concern that, in his bid to leave a legacy as a peacemaker, he risks being played for a sucker by the wily imams in Tehran.

But the congressional opposition is also partly in response to pressure from Israel.

A group of senators, including New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, is pushing legislation that would toughen the sanctions even as Secretary of State John Kerry and his European counterparts negotiate with Tehran, something Iran has labeled a "deal-breaker" and Obama has threatened to veto.

TENSIONS REGIONWIDE

The lobbying influence Israel exerts in the American Congress, often in opposition to the White House, is unique. In any other nation it might be considered a breach of national sovereignty. But not here, where Jewish votes and money, augmented by support from evangelical, Bible-citing Christians, are a potent political force.

Israel isn’t the only U.S. ally in the Middle East upset by Washington’s nuclear bargaining with Iran. Saudi Arabia, a Sunni kingdom and one side in Islam’s Sunni-Shi’a divide, bitterly opposes any letup in sanctions pressure on Shi’a-dominated Iran. But the Saudis lack the clout in Congress possessed by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby.

The Middle East will remain a source of trouble beyond just Iran, with calls for presidential leadership in solving or tamping down violence in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya and who knows where else. And, of course, there’s the ever-present Israeli-Palestinian standoff.

For the Obama administration, the Middle East is also a distraction from its real foreign policy objective — a turn toward Asia, where the president is said to believe America’s economic future lies and where an increasingly aggressive China represents a growing military threat to Japan, an ally we’re obliged by treaty to defend.

TOXIC ATMOSPHERE

It’s a full plate of issues Obama faces. But defeat on just two of those — Obamacare and the nuclear negotiations with Iran — could lose Obama the Senate next November and leave him the lamest of ducks, the latest presidential victim of the dreaded second-term jinx.

There will be other hurdles for the country and the president — another debt ceiling date in February or March, a potential battle over raising the minimum wage, what to do about the National Security Agency and its electronic surveillance methods, and immigration reform — to name just a few.

But, as Mike McCurry, press secretary to President Bill Clinton, has said, "The Affordable Care Act hovers over everything."

The recent budget deal between Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, to avoid a repeat of the disastrous government shutdown of last year has prompted talk of more collegiality on Capitol Hill this year. And some of that may occur early in the new session.

But it’s unlikely to last. With the approach of the fall elections, each party will find reason to cleave closer to its ideological and electoral base. House Speaker John Boehner may have stiff-armed the tea party in the Murray-Ryan budget bargain, but Republicans will need them in November.

GETTING OUT THE BASE

Midterm elections, unlike elections for president, are base-vote tests. Ordinarily, they favor the GOP, with its older, whiter, richer voter base. More of the Democratic base of younger voters, minorities and the poor tends to stay home in off years. And that’s why party strategists are pushing the minimum wage issue so strongly this time, in line with Obama’s campaign for greater income equality.

Obama is sure to make that a major part of the agenda he’ll lay out in his State of the Union message Jan. 28. But it might not occupy that principal place in the message.

That distinction is more likely to go to the one piece of early good news he can offer — an economy that’s on the mend.

Corporate profits are soaring. Bankers have recovered their mojo, lending money and peddling suspect stocks again. The stock market, ordinarily a leading indicator of good times ahead, is busting its buttons.

Unemployment claims are dropping — though the jobless rate remains stuck around 7 percent — and consumers, while still cautious, are starting to spend.

The recession’s been whipped, Obama can truthfully claim.

It’s something even Republicans in the House chamber might be tempted to applaud. But don’t bet on it. This is still Washington.